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MLA

Choudhury, Masudul Alam. "The Idea of God in Relation to the Social System: Banking as a Social System." Socio-Cybernetic Study of God and the World-System. IGI Global, 2014. 32-64. Web. 21 Jan. 2019. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-4643-8.ch002

APA

Choudhury, M. A. (2014). The Idea of God in Relation to the Social System: Banking as a Social System. In Socio-Cybernetic Study of God and the World-System (pp. 32-64). Hershey, PA: IGI Global. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-4643-8.ch002

Chicago

Choudhury, Masudul Alam. "The Idea of God in Relation to the Social System: Banking as a Social System." In Socio-Cybernetic Study of God and the World-System, 32-64 (2014), accessed January 21, 2019. doi:10.4018/978-1-4666-4643-8.ch002

The Idea of God in Relation to the Social System: Banking as a Social System

Abstract

The chapter continues from the groundwork of the socio-cybernetic perspective of the monotheistic law and its functioning in the moral and social construction of the unified world-system. The especial case of the financial and banking system is introduced to bring forth the functional meaning of God as the monotheistic law that is activated in the moral and ethical uplift of the world-system with its specific details. Here, the business model marks the particular case of a unified world-system guided by the epistemology of unity of knowledge. A rigorous formalism underlies this extensive worldview. The phenomenological model of unity of knowledge is further formalized to give it a functional explanation for later explanations in this book.

Introduction

The previous chapter dwelled on the possibility of extending the scientific model of world-system by integrating God into it as the Supreme Being who creates, governs, and sustains the universe by the divine law. The essential nature of the enabling divine law in the world-system was premised on the episteme of oneness of God and His law at work in the details of the world-system. Our claim in that chapter was that the quest for universality and extension of the socio-scientific model to 'everything' rests on the episteme of oneness, the unity of knowledge, and by it the unity of the world-system in every specific detail and generalization of the socio-scientific worldview and the particular issues within the generalization.

In this chapter, our objective is to establish the irreducibility and universality properties of monotheism taken up in its meaning of unity of divine knowledge, and how this episteme bestows functional ontological forms in respect of the epistemic unity. The essential focus of our inquiry in this chapter is that monotheism cannot be left aside as a sheer metaphysical way of understanding reality. Monotheism as law must have its well-definable, well-explainable, and well-applicable dimensions that carry with them the social discursive machinery and substantive crystallization of the emergent scientific ideas.

The financial system is then taken up to substantiate the holistic nature of the monotheistic law at work in its entirety in the socio-scientific order generating and evaluating a well-defined wellbeing criterion. The example of the financial system is a particular one within the general-system architecture of the universe examined in the dimensions of knowledge, time, and space. The similitude is to man as the meaningful individual who is capable of the divine breeze within the massive storm of the creative entirety. To realize such an inextricably meaningful relationship between self God and other, the world-system with its generalized and embedded particular systems and issues and designs must be a reflection of the functions of the divine law and its unraveling potentiality. The individual self-actualization within the unified and organically related universe is the ultimate meaning of the generalized universal design and of the embedded particulars within the generalized system of the epistemic unity formed, explained and re-generated in the continuums spanning the dimensions of knowledge, time, and space.

Some great philosophers of science have written in regard to such a union between God, self, and the unfolding, meaningful, deciphered universe and its details. The great Islamic philosopher, Abdul-Hameed Imam Ghazzali wrote (Karim, undated, p. 247): “… He (God) is the First in comparison with the things created as all things come from Him in seriatim one after another. He is the Last in comparison with the things that will remain, as they will return from stage to stage till they return to God. That is the end of their journey. So He is the first of the past things and He is the last of the future things.”

We use ‘the horizon of hope’ to mean traveling beyond the visible dimension of existence, and considering existence as an interrelated whole in the absence of which things and events cannot be perceived as they really are. Nor can its essence and relation with the Creator as well as the relation between them and humanity be grasped. Scientific disciplines that conduct their own discourse largely in isolation from one another and the prevailing materialistic nature of science that has compartmentalized existence and life cannot discover the reality of things, existence, or life.

Indeed, despite my total disagreement with Bruteau’s (1997) pantheistic depiction of unity between God and the universe, the following passage is nonetheless illuminating in depicting the meaning of the divine in our worldly experience:

If you can see the God you love present in, even as, this world, then feel that union and rejoice in that. And be active in it, contribute to it, participate in the building, in the artwork, in the healing, in the understanding. This is where Reality is. You yourself are both a member of the Finite and a member of the Infinite….

Agius (1990, pp. 82-83) summarizes Professor Whitehead's idea of the ontological principle in reference to the functional meaning of forms and relations that organically explain our universe and the details of its world-systems: